Re: best HD media player to replace xbmc

[James Reed <james.reed@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Paul Gordon wrote:

> I want to improve on this, firstly by getting rid of all the VHS
> tapes, and the VCR, and replace it with some kind of media tank. - My
> initial plan was to put in a modded XBOX running XBMC, - however my
> attempts to date at performing a modchip upgrade have been
> frustratingly unsuccessful, - and if I understand correctly, the
> softmod method doesn't allow for (easy) upgrade of the XBOX hard disk
> does it? - so I'd still need some other box to host the media files..
> - I guess this would either be a simple NAS box, - or possibly even
> just a USB disk... - My 1st question is thus: Does the XBOX work with
> locally attached USB disks? - the controller ports are just USB aren't
> they, - and I've seen mods online for adding standard USB ports etc. -
> If I were to plug in an external USB drive, could XBMC just use it
> seamlessly?
>
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It's actually pretty easy to upgrade the hard drive on a Xbox once you
have softmodded it. The key to it is extracting the EEPROM dump, which
can then be used to 'unlock' the hard drive and write out the correct
format for the new drive. This is done routinely as part of the
softmodding process.

You can then get a bootable Xbox linux distribution called 'xboxhdm'
which runs on a normal PC, and understands the xbox filesystem. From
memory, all you have to do is supply it with a copy of the EEPROM file
(from the modded xbox) and it will then format up the new drive. I'm not
sure what the size limit is, but you will need to partition it up a bit
to manage the space.

How much storage did you have in mind? The other advantage of doing this
is that it makes the Xbox a lot quieter and cooler, if you get the right
drive (Samsung spinpoint etc).

I'd be happy to help out if you wanted to do this. It's well worth
trying the softmod out as it's again pretty easy. Unless you're a hard
core modder I don't think you really need hardware modchips any more.

James


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